Seebo wants to make product design easier

That’s the common refrain parroted after the latest smart gadget failure. And it’s true. Building hardware is hard. and building connected hardware is even tougher. Seebo, a company founded in 2012, wants to help business overcome some of that challenge.

Seebo recently raised an additional $8 million as an extension of a Series A round, bringing its total funding to $22 million. The company provides IoT simulation software for companies that build connected products. It was founded by two Israeli brothers who learned through their first company building video game hardware that the combination of hardware and software is complex.

The brothers started building a simulation platform that would help engineers see some of those complexities before they started building in the physical world or wrote any code. The result is software that lets a user define what they want to build, from a connected industrial machine to a smart hard hat.

The software enables the engineers to drag and drop different types of radios, sensors and software options into the simulation to see how it performs. Customers can then order electronic parts via an ic search and see pricing. Seebo’s customers include Ralph Lauren, EvenFlo and Stanley Tools.

Seebo is different from many of the IoT platforms that are already clogging the industrial and enterprise IoT sector. Most of those focus on making connections between different standards and software platforms easier. Some offer machine learning or ways to optimize data.

The company falls in line with some of the modeling efforts out there, with PTC and Autodesk both offering digital twin services that create a digital version of whatever physical machine you are trying to build. The idea is that as you simulate problems on a building’s digital twin, it shows you how that actual building would react in real life. Autodesk offers a lot of great software for designers and engineers, like Revit. Some of them can be a bit tricky to learn, but fortunately places like Acuity offer a revit course among others, so anyone can learn how to use them.

Seebo has a deal that links its platform to Autodesk’s software so engineers can use Seebo to handle the connectivity aspects of a new product, while Autodesk software handles the rest of the physical design process. Basically, the idea is that its software can make building connected hardware a little less hard.

As time goes on, it’s hard to see this as more than a feature of a larger design software suite, but today with IoT as the new hotness, Seebo is making a go alone.